Virtual road trip

You can’t yet travel from Chicago to Los Angeles down Route 66 via Google Street View. But at the rate it’s going, it won’t be long.

Google Street View is a spectacular feature that offers 360-degree views at ground level. When first launched in May 2007, it had only five cities. Now, it’s more than 40.

And now you can surf sizable chunks of Route 66 in major metro areas and nearby towns:

• Chicago and its western suburbs, including the Illinois 53 alignment to just north of downtown Joliet.
• Virtually all of St. Louis, including the Manchester alignment. In metro-east Illinois, you can follow the Mother Road from Hamel a few miles south to the tiny settlement of Barnett. Street View resumes again in Edwardsville and stops at Chain of Rocks Road. Route 66 alignments across the Mississippi River include the Poplar Street Bridge and Martin Luther King Bridge.
• Nearly all of Tulsa, including the suburbs of Claremore, Catoosa, Sapulpa and Kellyville. You can even follow the old alignments of Old Sapulpa Road and about half of the old Ozark Trail.
• Virtually all of Oklahoma City, including the suburbs of Arcadia, Edmond, Bethany, Yukon and El Reno. You can see the famed Milk Bottle in Oklahoma City in a screen shot above.
• Nearly all of Albuquerque and Santa Fe. You can even follow the old Los Lunas alignment south of the Duke City. There are bits and pieces of the east Albuquerque suburbs of Moriarty, Edgewood and Tijeras.
• Virtually all of the Los Angeles region, including San Bernardino. You can even follow the descent from Cajon Summit down into the valley, but on Interstate 15, not the old road.

Street View is concentrating on metro areas, so I suspect that Amarillo, Flagstaff, Bloomington-Normal, Ill., both Springfields, maybe Joplin, Mo., and perhaps Kingman, Ariz., are coming soon.